Link: Journalism’s fatal disconnect with business - Lost Remote TV Blog.
I recently posted a longish comment on a post on the Lost Remote blog (I don't think it is strictly a TV blog anymore, as the masthead says "local media and the battle for the web"). Like many of us have, Lost Remote has engaged in a lot of soul-searching about what went wrong and what factors are to blame for this major shakeout in the Fourth Estate and the forced removal of what have to be thousands of veteran journalists from commercial participation in the profession (most blogs they are moving to are not yet commercially-viable).
At this point in my life, I've watched such shakeouts happen far too often, from my first days out of Journalism School in the mid-80s, although nothing as bad as what we see now.
I watched Radio majors graduating a few years after me immediately abandon their careers because of Reagan deregulation that allowed massive media chains to consolidate and automate radio properties on a scale that made that profession virtually disappear, just as print journalism is very likely equally hopeless for new journalism grads in the pipeline right now.
I watched 2-newspaper cities and towns become 1-newspaper monopolies, with the staff of one of those papers all let go (no matter what those bogus joint-operating-agreements stated). I was utterly demoralized then, yet that was nothing compared to what is happening now.
Much later, after teaching college for many years, I returned to journalism, this time in cable TV news, and again watched television newsrooms go through rounds of layoffs so regularly you'd think management was dosing on Ex-Lax.
These weren't Howard Beale-style layoffs made by cut-throat Faye Dunaways looking to corrupt the product (although there were those as well). Also rolling through TV and newspaper newsrooms were the deliberate purging of age and experience (where age became a liability in TV once you were over 30-- not on air, in the newsroom-- and over 40 in print) BECAUSE too much journalism experience meant you were more likely to protest at the full-on abandonment of journalistic standards and the embrace of presenting PR-created material as "news."
All small potatoes compared to what is happening now. Entire metropolitan areas may find themselves with NO newspaper of record very soon. This isn't just a convulsion in the field. It is a death rattle. I'm even following a Twitter feed called "Newspaper Death Watch."
So into this conversation comes analysis and blame, and the folks who are ready to pile on and claim traditional journalism was too hidebound and principled and worked itself into an anachronism (this argument is in alignment with the management philosophies that practiced illegal age discrimination in newsrooms, for its most crass purpose, because 20-somethings can be so green and easily intimidated as to abandon journalistic principles in ways that most veteran journalists are not).
So much of the blame centers around bizarre wrong-headedness in how to handle companion web ventures for newspapers, a primo opportunity that most newspapers missed out of sheer blindness to the media shift. Perhaps that is all that is happening now, paying the piper for believing the web was nothing more than a "horseless carriage," rather than a serious competitor for print, TV, and radio.
But with all the blame to go around, some go after the so-called "Great Wall" erected in the U.S. press between business/advertising and editorial content, a means to ensure that editorial stories were not being influenced by interested parties with axes to grind (a more than respectable purpose, and one I take a lot of comfort in, even though it may be, as Shakespeare put it, "more honor'd in the breach than in the observance."
There are many voices today arguing, "Tear down that wall!" They want to unleash journalism online and unite it with "pay-per-post" and sweetheart deals with advertisers, "creative" entrepreneurial solutions that will maximize SEO and online distribution systems with social media (the latter generally a good thing), while taking a pencil eraser to some seriously enshrined principles of journalistic ethics, even when only honored in the breach, because those things can serve to distinguish journalism from interested public relations and bald-faced marketing copy masquerading as editorial content.
I am not a fan of "objectivity" in journalism (pseudo-objectivity), a fiction which really only holds court in the U.S. press, and is dealt with far more sanely in international journalism. Removing point of view from reporting created a fiction, a lie, a form of posturing that hurts basic U.S. journalism to this day. All observations have perspectives, and good journalists will OWN and CLAIM their perspectives (as bloggers do), rather than pretend their eyeballs do not reside within their own heads. U.S. journalists are usually forced to adopt a floating disembodied deity perspective, WHICH IS A LIE.
But I remain a supporter of keeping advertising and business interests separate from editorial interests, and working hard at keeping editorial copy, no matter what form of delivery it takes, from morphing into primarily marketing copy, essentially pissing away journalistic credibility in the process. Newsrooms and editorial filters don't create that credibility (and they've already lost a lot of it). It is earned every day with readers/listeners/watchers/co-creators.
So I say, "Don't Tear Down That Wall!" And here is my response posted to the Lost Remote blog post (sorry about the length, but I care too much about this topic to not carry on about it). I'll also quote some bits from Cory Bergman's original article to set some of the context.
Link: Journalism’s fatal disconnect with business - Lost Remote TV Blog.
Journalism’s fatal disconnect with business
Cory Bergman February 26th, 2009
With the Seattle Post-Intelligencer likely in its final days, I’ve been attending a few of the many panel discussions and meetups in town about the future of journalism. Here in Seattle, the home of Microsoft and hundreds of other technology companies, surely we can figure out a way to bring journalism back from the brink. Right?
But nearly every one of these discussions, attended mostly by journalists and academics, downgrades into a frustrating and largely meaningless exchange of ideas. The problem: journalists wash their hands of the business side of the equation. That’s the business guys’ problem, said one newspaper journalist. But it’s not. It’s everyone’s problem. And the “Great Wall” separating news and the business side has expedited newspapers’ decline.
Now, I’m not proposing using journalism to influence business decisions, directly or indirectly. I’m proposing leveraging a community through technology to help people make better decisions about their lives — including decisions to buy products and services — which dramatically increases revenue potential. Does Yelp violate journalism ethics by allowing a community to self-organize around business information? Of course not. Does it help serve the user? Absolutely. How about Zvents, a popular social events calendar? Same thing. Can the “business guy” build this all by himself, without the help of journalists, the people arguably closest to the user?
By splitting journalism and business into two buckets separated by a longstanding cultural divide, the two groups fail to collaborate on ideas that tap the strengths of both.
[...]
This level of collaboration and organization-wide commitment has been painfully missing in local media companies. Journalists want to do traditional news, which is repurposed online. Sales folks want to do traditional reach advertising, which is repurposed online. And technology folks, well, they’re usually understaffed and misinterpreted as the “IT folks.”
[...]
Some really great comments available at the original post as well, comments as valuable as the posting. Go read them.
Meanwhile,
Here's my response to Bergman and his commenters:
(I've tweaked my grammar a bit for clarity)
I personally find it extremely hard to believe there is a working journalist who doesn't know that the newspaper's costs are not covered by subscriptions and single copy sales.
This is a core principle of Journalism 101, and every possessor of a journalism degree (I can't vouch for the others) would have had to DITCH quite a lot of classes to have missed that key principle that is instilled in every budding young journalist from day 1.
And if not then, they hear it very quickly on the job, the first time they propose doing a story that has ANYTHING to do with a supermarket, which, as we all know, are TABOO simply because for most small newspapers, they are the biggest advertisers.
I patently disbelieve the problems facing this industry right now have anything to do with the so-called "Great Wall," which in and of itself has become so corrupted over the years by supermarkets and other big advertisers (back to school "special sections," anyone?) as fully as it has by the euphemism of "video press releases" and other similar "interested content suppliers" to newsrooms.
Holding the "Great Wall" to blame is nothing but a rationalizing scapegoat, a paper tiger, a straw man, and journalists are right to defend the little corner of that wall that is left.
Remove the wall, put the column inches up for sale (online or off) and you might as well forget about even calling it journalism, and let it all blur into the amorphous PR that is the REAL corporate agenda behind all this transitional cost-cutting. Hell, let's make them all look like the annual report dittoheads and fluff they will become (worse than it is already).
Whatever you do, don't blame corporate management for carrying too much debt, for sucking up too many papers into their massive behemoths, or for making these overly thick monsters into a giant red herring for the nuggets of real journalism that one has to look to find between all the fodder inserted for the advertiser and not the reader. It sure is awfully convenient for media conglomerate management to blame working journalists and throw us off the real trail.
Now, I will grant you this one primary point: journalists have become too disconnected from their communities, too isolated, too much in a bubble. That is their own fault, but it is also the fault of being part of a massive carpet-bagging corporate newspaper chain (as most of them are), parachuting into distant communities, with management brought in from outside and journalists encouraged to climb climb climb to ever distant metropolises.
Even with that weight, my friends over the years have mostly stayed rooted in communities, been part of them, stayed at single papers far longer than I could have. And do you know what they have faced? Constant corporate cutbacks on local coverage and reporters, CONSTANT, 20 years worth of constant. They fight to get inches for local stories around the AP copy used like so much filler, like so many Ann Landers columns or syndicated comics pages.
Section fronts, in some small towns, are all you get for local from the corporate chains. And barely the staff to fill section fronts. Inside those section fronts, it is worse than fishwrap. These papers in many cases were 100-year institutions and participants in community life, BEFORE the carpet-baggers moved in in order to build a pipeline to syphon local ad revenue out of communities and back into the coffers, or the corporate debt service so they could buy and gut more small town papers.
Journalists not knowing that subscriptions and single copy sales don't pay the bills? Get real. They are reminded of that fact every day that they go out into their communities and attempt to cover stories.
The bigger problem is that by letting advertising drive the bus (and I do support the ad model over a paid subscription model online) is that the advertisers became the REAL audience for the paper. Journalists who stubbornly refused to believe this are a dying breed, especially if they still wrote for communities and readers instead of winning awards and striving for their next step up the corporate chain ladder.
But the bulk of that 66% ad-supported content was as throwaway for readers as you could imagine. The ONLY reason many of those stories even existed was for the advertisers to read and file.
That's the disconnect that the online model will solve, with massive structural changes in the field. Just like women's magazines that place how-to put on make-up stories across from a make-up ad, newspapers allowed their relationships with advertisers to corrupt the papers to the point that their product became too irrelevant for real readers.
Journalism has to court readers again, to be sure, and teach advertisers that readers have more power than the advertisers' push model arrogantly denies them.
Some sure do like thinking turning journalists into entrepreneurs will save the world, and I seriously doubt that. Journalists getting even more cozy in bed with the people (advertisers) that drove their audience away will not bring the audience back.
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